Long Past Stopping (35 page)

“It'll be fine,” Dana said. “You just have to promise to pull out.”

 

Squirmin' serum 'n semen 'n syrup 'n semen 'n serum,

 

Captain Beefheart continued.

Dana barely made it out of my room a few minutes before ten, but it seemed as though the news had already traveled.

“Jesus Christ, man. What happened to you?” Matt asked me out in the hall as everyone was showing up back at that dorm.

“What are you talking about? Nothing,” I answered, trying as hard as I could to look normal.

“Oh my fucking God! You finally did it. Congratulations,” he said. Then Aaron saw me and figured it out as well. Even my art teacher, Thom, who was more like the crazy uncle I never had than a teacher, did a double take as he checked off our names on his clipboard. When everyone was accounted for, he found me and quietly asked, “So…how did it go?”

“What do you mean?”
How could he possibly know already? It had only been three minutes since Dana had left.

“You know. How long did it last?” It seemed like a weird question, but after hesitating a moment I said, “I don't know. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Ten minutes? Good job. I don't think I even lasted thirty seconds. Seriously, though, what you just did is a big deal. Congratulations.”

“Hey, Thom, how the hell does everyone know already?”

“Are you kidding? Go look at yourself in the mirror, man. You're too young to win the lottery. What else could it be?”

I took his advice and went to the bathroom. It was true. I couldn't
stop smiling, no matter how hard I tried, which I actually found rather disturbing. Could getting laid really destroy the cynical, negative, misanthropic self-image I had worked so hard to achieve?

For almost two weeks there was noticeably less bitching and moaning coming from me. Once the thrill of finally having sex wore off though, the old Oran started reemerging, and most of my grumbling was directed at Dana.

“I can't work with you staring at me like that. It's making me nervous,” I snapped at her while I was working on a painting in the art studio. For about an hour I had managed to pretend there was nothing unusual about someone staring at me while I stared at a canvas, but that was as long as I could take it.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked, obviously hurt.

“No, but look around. There are better things to do than watch me. Why don't you make something?” I asked.

“I like watching you,” she answered.

Watching me paint? Clearly she's fucking crazy.
I didn't like it one bit. Feeling trapped and suffocated, I told her I didn't think it was going to work out between us.

 

M
Y SCHOOL WASN'T
big on traditions, but we did have two yearly events that were unique to us. Instead of proms and home-comings, we had Ring Turning and Fire Run.

Ring Turning was a bizarre treasure hunt devised by the seniors, in which the juniors had to solve hundreds of clues, sometimes taking them as far away as Flagstaff or Phoenix. The goal was to find where the seniors had hidden their class rings. There was never any warning for it either. One day a solitary index card with a clue would be pinned to the bulletin board, signaling the start of Ring Turning, and giving the juniors one week to follow the clues and find the rings. Nothing was off-limits: The clue “Fireman Award” led to a spot out in the desert where a kid named Howard had passed out directly on top of a campfire, which the other students had successfully put out by pissing on him. “Sheathed/Unsheathed” led the clue seeker to the creek, where in a drunken stupor I had given in to peer pressure from fifteen other kids who wanted to see what an uncircumcised penis looked like. As seniors, we were let out of all our obligations in order to take shifts ambushing the juniors with high-pressure fire hoses whenever they tried to go to class, eat in the cafeteria,
or make any attempt at walking by one of the many fire hydrants on campus. During Ring Turning the school was turned into a war zone, with the juniors and seniors looking like guerrilla freedom fighters, covered from head to toe in red mud.

Shortly after Ring Turning, the headmaster informed me that Fire Run would happen on the next Wednesday, at 2:30 a.m. I quietly spread the word, and that night, the seniors waited for everyone to go to sleep and watched for the security guard to give us the signal. Armed with flashlights, we snuck out of our dorms and hiked about a half mile off campus to the top of a thousand-foot rock, where we had been amassing a pile of scrap wood over the course of the year for a bonfire. When we lit the fifteen-foot bonfire, the juniors started running through the dorms banging on pots and pans, setting off fire alarms, and yanking everyone else out of bed. We then stood around the top edge of the rock formation holding gigantic flaming torches in the air until we could hear the students cheering us on from campus, at which point we started running down the sheer side of the rock as fast as we could using our torches to light the way. Miraculously, no one had ever been seriously injured during Fire Run, especially considering that a fair number of us were drunk at the time. A couple of kids always got bruised up or sprained their ankles, but even they had so much fun they probably would have gone straight back up and done it again.

I had been antsy as hell all year to go out and make my mark on the world, but running down the side of that mountain made me realize just how lucky I was to have spent four years at this wacky place, doing things most kids would never get to experience, and this was only one of the countless once-in-a-lifetime experiences I had there. How many kids were lucky—or unlucky—enough to get dropped off in Mexico, or the Hopi Reservation, or the middle of Tucson, or Oaxaca for a three-week field trip, virtually unattended?

Mostly I was going to miss my friends and teachers, whose only expectation of me was to be myself. Unfortunately, I didn't fully appreciate what an amazing experience high school had been until I found myself running down the side of a rock at three thirty in the morning, jumping over cacti and trying not to light myself or anything else on fire. I couldn't imagine a more appropriate end to what had been an amazing four years.

 

O
UR GRADUATION CEREMONY
took place on the quad, where all thirteen of us seniors sat around while the teachers spoke of their hopes for us and singled some of us out for awards. Despite my shitty grades, I ended up getting the overall achievement award for my creative abilities and duties as the student-body president. I had also managed to get a scholarship to go to the San Francisco Art Institute.

Once we received our diplomas and were shaking hands with our teachers, I found Gary.

“So, who was it?” No one had come up with any ideas about who was involved in the student-teacher relationship he had told us about.

“You haven't figured it out yet? All right. You can't tell anyone, but it was me,” he answered.

“You? That's fucked up. I had no idea.”

“Of course you didn't.”

“Aha. The only reason you told us you knew was to take attention off yourself.”

“And it totally worked,” he said, gloating.

“Yeah, but you haven't told me who it was with,” I said.

“Jesus. I can't tell you that, but I'll give you a hint. She's wearing cutoffs.”

“Everyone's wearing cutoffs,” I said, looking around. But there was only one girl I could see Gary risking his job over. “Wow” was all I could say when I figured it out.

Jack had come out with his wife, Georgia, and my six-week-old half-brother, Christopher. “I just want to say, I'm really proud of you, son,” he told me.

I didn't show it, but it totally pissed me off. I didn't think he had the right to be proud, considering he'd never been involved in my life. True, he paid my way through school, but I wanted to be angry so I chose not to think about that part.

As if he were psychic, he went on to say, “I know I had nothing to do with it, and I'm not taking any credit, but I'm proud of you anyway.”

“Well, thanks. And hey, now you have another chance,” I said, referring to Christopher, who may have been a cute baby, but it was hard to tell since he was recovering from a rash that completely covered his face. I wanted to feel some kind of connection with him—after all, he was my brother—but babies made me a little uncomfortable. Or maybe it was that I thought I was supposed to act a certain way around babies that made me uncomfortable. Jack seemed genuinely excited about Christopher, though, despite the bags under his eyes.

“And here,” he said, pulling an envelope from his pocket. “This is for you.”

I looked at the two hundred-dollar bills he gave me, and thanked him, trying to hide my disappointment.

 

T
HE NEXT DAY,
hung over from getting drunk with my friends and teachers—another high school tradition I hadn't known about—I set out for my new life in California with Eli, who had come back to see us graduate, Aaron, and two other friends all packed into my tiny Honda. We only got a half mile from campus before the car made a loud noise and died.

When we got it to the shop, the guy told me it was going to cost two hundred bucks and it would be three days before they could get the part. I handed over the envelope Jack had given me, and Eli called his mom to come pick us up and take us to her house.

G
OING BACK TO
my first rehab in Redwood City was certainly a blow to my ego after all the shit I had told them, but I was fucking beat down, confused, and had lost all hope. I was experiencing incomprehensible demoralization, as they called it in the recovery scene, and I had to admit that it described my situation perfectly. Not a single one of my bright ideas had worked, and I was finally ready to listen to these fucking people.
If they tell me to go to meetings, I'll go to meetings,
I thought to myself.
If they tell me to get a sponsor, I'll get a sponsor. If I have to live in the clean and sober house with four other guys in the same room, I'll live in the fucking clean and sober house.

“Just have a seat, someone will be with you,” the receptionist said when I checked in.

I sat down and looked through the stack of magazines they had sitting on a desk. Although I had been in that room many times, I had never really noticed it before. It was like a waiting room at a dentist's office. They even had one of those
Highlights
magazines I remembered from the last time I had gone to the dentist, when I was twelve. I was looking for the carrot, the starfish, the fork, and the number seven that were supposed to be hidden in one of the drawings when Barry, the head honcho himself, came out. He didn't seem pleased or unhappy to see me. Just unusually official.

“Hi, Oran,” he said, without adding any type of “how have you been?” or “good to see you.” “The staff is all busy at the moment, so let's get the physical out of the way now.”

He led me back to the examination room and told me to take off my clothes. It was weird. Usually he tried to be funny—cracking jokes, making the clients feel at ease. This time, it was all formality. He checked my heart rate, blood pressure, and reflexes, before I noticed him putting on a rubber glove. Grabbing a bottle of KY jelly out of a cabinet, he asked, “Can you drop your drawers and bend over for me, please?”

“Um, I don't think that's necessary. I feel fine, really.”

“I'm the doctor, and I think it's necessary. Just bend over. It'll be so quick you won't even know what happened.”

“Do you have to? You never did it last time.”

“Hey, Oran. Here you are for the third time, and you still think you know more than the professionals? Now bend over!”

He was not fucking around. This wasn't on the list of things I thought they would ask me to do to stay clean, but I turned toward the bed and bent over.
If they tell me to bend over so they can stick their finger in my ass, I'll bend over and….
The whole thing was done before I could even finish my thought, but I still felt violated.

Barry, on the other hand, seemed to lighten up a bit afterward. “All clear, everything's fine. No growths, polyps, or vegetations—you're good to go,” he said in a more relaxed tone of voice. I put my clothes back on in silence.

“Hey, man, I don't like doing that any more than you do,” he said.

“It didn't seem that way,” I responded. “Can I go now?”

“We're done. You can either wait in the lobby or go join the yoga class and Eileen will come get you when she's ready.”

“What happened to Jan?”

“Jan's got a full caseload. We're putting you with Eileen for now but will revisit it when Jan has an opening.”

It wasn't long before Eileen came to get me. We went to her office, where she told me to start from the last time I was there.

“Well, I jumped out the window and caught the train back to San Francisco,” I started.

“Why did you jump out of the window? You could have just walked right out the door. The whole house had to get in the van and drive around looking for you,” she interrupted me.

“Because I would have had to deal with twenty people trying to con
vince me I would be dead within the first ten minutes of leaving,” I answered.

“True.”

“It was like I was possessed or something. I needed to get high right then.”

“Okay, go on.”

I told her an abbreviated version of the next two years, but it still took a while.

“So why did you come back here?” she asked me. “You were in what—five, six other rehabs since we last saw you? And in that time you have managed to stay continuously sober for only three months?”

I nodded.

“Seriously, what makes you think it's going to work this time?”

“Well, those other rehabs were bullshit. They were just out to make money, and the counselors only had a couple years sober, and were making ten bucks an hour repeating slogans like a bunch of programmed zombies. I just remembered a much higher quality of treatment here.”

“You do know, Oran, that even though we may be more educated, we do use the AA model here because we think it's the only one that works. We may be wrong, but that's what you're going to get here.”

“Yeah, I know. I hate it, but I'm ready for it. Honestly, I'll fucking do anything right now. I give up. I'm done. If I knew for a fact I would die out there, I wouldn't have come back, but my big fear is that I'll just keep going somehow and I'm just too much of a fucking wimp to kill myself. I swear, I'm finally ready to do this shit.” I was starting to get choked up, so I stopped.

She stared at me for a little while with a sad look. I didn't know what else to say, so I just waited.

“You know, it's kind of funny. The last two times you were here, we would have done anything to get you to say what you just said. But now that you're actually saying it, the whole thing is making me terribly sad. I'm not even sure why. For some reason, I have a picture in my head of a bird with its wings cut off. What happened to that crazy, dope-sick kid who walked in here two years ago? I mean, you hadn't slept in like seven days, you were shitting in your pants, but you were able to stand your ground against thirty people. Do you remember that night?”

“I remember,” I said, thinking about what a maniac I must have looked like.

“You were maybe the most stubborn, obnoxious, hardheaded, all-around pain in the ass I have ever seen in my years as a counselor, and…
I need to think about this some more, because…I don't know where it's coming from, but I think I liked that obnoxious kid who came in here raising hell more than what I'm looking at right now.”

“Do you think I'm just saying this shit because I think it's what you want to hear?” I asked, but not in any kind of confrontational way. I was just curious.

“Unfortunately, no. With all the doctors and lawyers that come through here, you think we don't know how to deal with that? That's easy. If I thought you were just trying to say the right thing, then I'd have something to work with.”

“Okay,” I said, absolutely perplexed. “Then what do you think I should do?”

“That's what's bothering me. The old Oran wouldn't have asked that question. Listen, we talked about you at the staff meeting before you got here, and we had worked out a tentative plan, but apparently we were discussing a different person. I'm going to have to think about this for a while. In the meantime, just jump right in. We'll talk soon. Someone will show you the house you're staying in after the alumni meeting.” They decided that, since I had already gone through detox in Oxnard, I could stay at another sober house and do day treatment.

“Thanks, Eileen,” I said, getting up to go.

“Oh, here are a couple of books I brought for you. They're both about creativity and addiction. Look them over. It might be totally irrelevant, but we'll talk about it later.”

Normally I would have been mortified at the thought of reading a self-help book, but I took them as further proof of how far down I'd come.

When I went back upstairs, it was dinnertime. Not feeling at all like jumping right in, I used my freedom as a day patient to walk down the street and get a sandwich. I sat down with my food and mulled over what Eileen had said. I couldn't make any sense out of it. Was there an angle? If there was, what the hell could it have been? I didn't like it at all, but something had resonated and not in a good way. I was still lost in thought on my way back for the alumni meeting. She was right, though. The old Oran wouldn't have said any of that shit. In fact, the old Oran might have committed suicide for me had he seen a glimpse of his hollow shell walking down the street two years in the future, actually looking forward to an AA meeting. Goddamn, that would have made things easier.

I took a seat in the back. It was an anniversary meeting, meaning that those who had celebrated a milestone in sobriety would go up and ramble
on about how the rehab and AA changed their lives, and everything was amazing now, and all we have to do is not drink, and go to meetings, and get a sponsor, and do the steps, and help a newcomer, and read the book, and keep it simple, and on, and fucking on, and life will be fantastic.

Even though I had said I would do anything to stay sober, there was still a big difference between me and these people. I was resigned to this AA sentence because I simply had nowhere else to go. These people were so psyched to tell the world how awesome AA was that I couldn't tell whom they were trying to convince. Themselves? Me? Their wives? It all looked like a big charade.
If I just act all excited and stuff, then maybe I can convince myself everything will be okay.
Oh well, I didn't come back here to make friends.

Toward the end of the meeting, a guy who had been a client the last time I was there walked up to the front of the room to get his two-year anniversary coin.

“Hey, I'm Frank, and I'm an alcoholic,” he said to the crowd. “I want to thank everyone for this. When I came in here, I'd been smoking pot every day since I was twelve, you know. But at some point it stopped working, and it just started making me angry, and, well…” The same old shit. I did remember him as being extremely angry, though. I started zoning out and thinking about the last time I had been here and we were in group therapy together. He was the only guy I had ever met who was in rehab for pot. It just wasn't that common. He would go on and on about how addictive pot was, as if he had to prove something to us. I remembered hating the guy. Not so much because he was a pothead, but because he just seemed like a fucking idiot and said the stupidest shit, like, “You know how people think pot's not addictive, man? Well, I'm here to tell you it is. What about the shakes, man? What about the cold sweats, huh? What about the wanting to jump out of your fucking skin, man?”

I didn't get it. The guy looked like a real estate broker, but he talked like a cross between a hippie and an ex-con trying to scare the kids away from a life of crime. “You guys have no idea what it's like to wake up from these nightmares, and they don't go away just 'cause you wake up, man. Oh no…”

“Um. Excuse me? Am I allowed to say something?” I had asked Jan at the time, cutting the guy off from his after-school-special pot rant. I hadn't yet learned how this group therapy thing worked, but I couldn't take this anymore.

“Well, normally we like to wait for people to finish with their turn, but sure. Go ahead.” I think Jan was giving me special treatment because
it was the first time I had opened my mouth voluntarily. The pothead looked as if he wanted to rip my head off for interrupting, but that seemed preferable to having to listen to any more of his bullshit.

“Hey. Would you shut the fuck up? Look around you, man. We're all going through this shit. Please…do you think any of us wants to be here? Jesus fucking Christ! It's pathetic, man.” I didn't know where it came from, because the last thing anyone would have called me was a tough guy. Instead of lunging at me, though, he just kind of collapsed back in his chair looking stunned.

“Well, Oran,” Jan said with a hint of amusement. “That is not usually how we do it here, but…”

“I'm sorry,” I said, a bit stunned myself.

“Frank. Did you hear what Oran just said?” Jan went on without missing a beat.

“Yes.”

“And how did it make you feel?”

As my mind came back to the alumni meeting, Frank was up at the podium saying, “I don't think he meant it this way, but when that junkie kid told me to shut the fuck up…that I wasn't the only one going through this…well, for the first time in my life I realized I wasn't alone. All of us have been through hell, and that's what gives us the ability to understand and help one another.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

“That kid saved my life, but I'm pretty sure he just wanted me to shut the fuck up. Thanks.”

I found him after the meeting and congratulated him for his two years. “Hey listen, man. I'm assuming that story was about me. I need to apologize for telling you to shut up. I was out of my mind back then.”

“I know you were out of your mind. We all were, but until you said that I really thought I was the only person who had ever felt that way. I mean, Jesus…you were sitting there kicking heroin and you had to listen to a pothead bitch about withdrawal symptoms? Seriously, man, you saved my life. I tell that story at almost every meeting I go to.”

I had to admit that he did seem a hell of a lot calmer now. That whole tough, hippie, real-estate-broker persona had vanished.

“It's pretty ironic that I was able to unintentionally save your life, and here I am back at this fucking place.”

“Oh. You're back as a patient? I assumed you were here for the meeting. I just thought I should come back and show the new people that it works,” he said.

“Well, I'm a ‘new people,' and it seems to have helped you,” I said, trying to be funny. God, I had even lost my sense of humor.

“At least you don't look as bad as you did last time. I'm sorry you're still struggling, but it's good to see you, man. Good luck,” he said, shaking my hand.